The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (3 page)

Sitting on the toilet in her apartment, Lily felt grateful to be off her feet. Her jeans and underpants were lying on the floor, and she was looking down at the blood stain on the white material of her underpants, its red brilliant against the denim and the dull blue floor tiles. She didn’t want to move, but after several seconds she reached for her tampons, unwrapped one and pushed it inside her. She glanced down at the blue string between her legs, at her bare knees and the lines of their bones, and had one of those sudden, curious feelings, more sensation than thought, and more familiar to children than adults, that she wasn’t really there in the room at all, that she had been blown out of her own head somewhere else, and that every thing she was looking at was no longer itself, but a kind of inanimate impostor. Lily changed position to get rid of the feeling and then changed into a fresh pair of underpants and jeans.

She opened the back door to the cafe slowly. She wanted to look in on Edward Shapiro at the counter, but he was gone. Instead, she saw Martin only three or four feet in front of her, standing beside the Bodlers’ booth, and at that very second, he was handing Filthy Frank two twenty-dollar bills. Half a minute later, she would have missed the whole transaction. Frank took the money, picked at his greasy shirt pocket and tucked the bills inside. Then he handed Martin the bag. It was the way Martin took the bag that gave Lily a start. As he reached for it, his fingers trembled with expectation, and his eyes rolled upward so that for an instant his pupils disappeared and all she saw was white. His lips parted, and she heard him exhale. Lily didn’t know what she was seeing, but whatever lay inside that dirty grocery bag, it had affected Martin in a way that embarrassed her. She suffered for him, for his oddness, for his not knowing how to act, for that horrible expression that was much too private for a cafe. She pushed the door open, and in her hurry to get past him, accidentally brushed his elbow. Damn, she said to herself as she confirmed that Shapiro had really and truly vanished. She felt a light touch on her shoulder, turned around and saw Martin staring down at her. He stuttered out her name and said, “I’m leaving something for you on the table.”

She glanced down at the bag that Martin was holding in his left hand. “A present for me?” She knew perfectly well that it wasn’t. The question was prompted by irritation with him, and she heard an edge in her voice.

He shook his head, and Lily turned away from him to avoid his face.

She hurried over to Bert and said, “So, what’s he like?”

Bert looked up. “To whom are you referring?” she said with an artificial sniff.

“Ah, cut it out. Give me the dope.”

“He came and went like lightning, but for the minute he was here, I’d say he was real class, real nice and not stuck-up at all.”

“Yeah?” Lily said. She slid behind the counter and poured Matt Halvorsen more coffee. “Did you talk about anything?”

“He said he’d take a doughnut.”

“That’s deep,” Lily said.

“I said, ‘Which one?’ and pointed at the case. Then he said in New York you don’t get to pick ’em, and I said, ‘Well, this ain’t New York,’ and he said he knew that, and that he’d take the one without the hole, more for your money. He swilled down his coffee in three seconds flat, grabbed the doughnut and ran out the door.”

Lily pressed her lips together. “His eyes are kind of unusual, wouldn’t you say? They go up a little. Did you notice?”

Bert nodded. “Almond shaped. That’s uncommon, at least around here.”

“He’s uncommon, all right.”

Lily and Bert turned their heads to spot the eavesdropper.

Ida Bodine walked toward them, carrying her coffee cup. The tiny woman wore her hair in a towering beehive to compensate for the missing inches.

“Gossip radar,” Bert said to Lily in a low voice.

“He’s got somethin’ goin’ up in his room,” Ida said. “I’ve been hearin’ things.”

“What kind of things?” Lily said.

“Bangin’, creakin’. More than once I’ve had to tell him to cut the racket—opera music blarin’ till it busts your eardrums. It’s my job as night manager to keep things runnin’ smooth-like, and that one’s made my job a regular hell.”

Night desk clerk, you mean, Lily thought to herself. “Doesn’t sound so bad to me,” she said aloud. “A little noise.”

Ida sipped her coffee, her eyes on Lily. “That ain’t all. I seen people goin’ in there when I start work at six, and they don’t go in the front door neither, go in the back from the river side and stay in there with him for hours. And they ain’t what you call ‘nice’ folks neither.” Ida nodded.

“I think a man’s got a right to see anyone he pleases,” Bert said.

Ida looked straight at Bert, cocked her head to one side and smiled with false sweetness. “Tex?” she said.

Lily looked at Ida, who had put down her coffee cup and folded her arms across her chest. It did seem unlikely. Lily conjured an image of the big man—six feet five with long red sideburns, a nose bent from too many fights and a big beer belly hanging over his pants. Vince had banned him from the Ideal a couple of years before Lily started as a waitress, and she rarely met up with him, but Hank knew Tex from the city jail, where he sometimes spent the night in one or the other of the two cells. Hank’s summer job as a dispatcher at the Webster Police and Fire Department had made him an expert on the big redhead’s misdemeanors. It was true that his crimes usually didn’t amount to much more than disturbing the peace, but he disturbed the peace at a pretty regular clip and drove the officers batty. Tex’s last offense had taken place last Thursday, when he barged through the doors of the Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall out on Highway 19, howling like Tarzan as he loped down the aisle dressed in nothing but a pair of leopard bikini underwear, a ten-gallon hat and cowboy boots.

“I’d say Tex must’ve paid that Shapiro fellow eight or nine visits, and the last time I seen him, he was comin’ out of the room buttonin’ up his shirt.” Ida’s face puckered in disgust.

Bert gaped at Ida in mock horror. “Why, Ida Bodine,” she said. “If the man’s a fruit, I’m a five-eyed alien from the next galaxy.”

Ida sniffed. “I’m just sayin’ what I seen, nothin’ more.”

“Come on, Ida,” Lily said. “Edward Shapiro taught at Courtland. He had a good job there—”

Ida interrupted. “His wife left him, didn’t she? It’s gonna be divorce.” She hissed the last consonant. “Tell me this, if he’s so hoity-toity, big professor and all, what’s he doin’ in the Stuart?”

Lily glanced at Bert, then back at Ida. “I think he’s painting.” Her tone had more vehemence than she had intended.

Ida raised her eyebrows. “You know what they say about the paintings, don’t you? They’re pictures of Webster, and they ain’t none of our beauty spots. I guess he’s done the grain elevator and the tracks and the dump and made ’em real ugly to show all of us here that we’re a bunch of hicks.”

Lily had only seen the backs of Shapiro’s paintings, but she wondered why he would paint outdoor scenes inside.

“Now where did you get that information?” Bert said.

“Around.” Ida narrowed her eyes.

Lily leaned over the counter toward Ida. “And what law says he can’t paint whatever the hell he wants?”

Ida moved her head back from Lily. “Well, la-di-da,” she said. “If you aren’t takin’ this personal.” The woman retrieved a Kleenex from her purse and dabbed either side of her mouth with it. It was a gesture of absurd, extravagant femininity that made Lily want to laugh. Ida lowered the napkin and clutched it in two hands. “What I’d like to know, Lily Dahl, is what’s that New York Jew to you?”

Lily glared at Ida but said nothing. Bert gave Lily an uneasy glance. Then Ida crumpled the napkin in one fist, lifted her coffee cup from the counter and walked back to her stool.

“Windbag,” Bert said.

“He’s Jewish,” Lily said, observing the fact aloud.

“Shapiro,” Bert said. “It’s a Jewish name.”

“Oh,” Lily said. She felt herself blush and wondered why Bert knew such things when she didn’t. She looked at the clock. It was pushing seven. Soon there’d be another rush when the downtown merchants came in for a bite before opening their stores. Lily surveyed the room. She had missed the Bodlers’ exit. “God, Bert, you cleaned the scuz booth.”

“So you owe me.” Bert picked up a stack of dishes, then motioned with her head toward the door.

Hank Farmer walked in and smiled at Lily. His face looked a little swollen, but then all night at the police station would clobber anybody. He gave Lily a quick kiss on the cheek, and instead of straightening up, he kept his head level with hers and said, “I’m going home to sleep, but I’d like to see you later, okay?”

Lily looked into his handsome face. He was so close she could see the faint scars of adolescent acne. A piece of dark blond hair had fallen onto his forehead. She didn’t answer him but looked past his cheek at Martin’s empty booth and studied the inverted letters of the neon sign in the window. She leaned back a couple of inches. “Call me,” she said. “I feel a little low. My period.”

Hank nodded and kissed her again. She watched him bound out the door and across the street. He moved beautifully, and she thought to herself that he looked better from a distance. She stared through the window and fiddled with the pad in her apron pocket.

Bert addressed Lily’s back. “I know you’re juggling love interests right and left here, Lil’, but you better get that fanny of yours back to work.”

Lily didn’t bother to turn around. She wiggled her hips at Bert and said, “It’s seven. I’m going to play something before you-know-who gets there first.” Lily looked over her shoulder toward the jukebox and saw Boomer Wee coming through the kitchen doors.

“Cut him off at the pass!” Bert yelled, flinging an arm toward Boomer.

Lily made a dash for the jukebox, but Boomer was too fast for her, and by the time she reached it, he was leaning over the selections. His T-shirt had hiked up his back, exposing his white skin and bony spine. “Don’t you dare play that song. Get back to the dishes!” she hissed at Boomer, trying to elbow him away from the box. “You’re going to kill me with that song.” But Boomer blocked her and she heard the rattle of the quarter, the click of the machine and then Elvis started singing “Blue Suede Shoes.”

“You little skunk,” Lily said to Boomer, who was smiling innocently on his way to the kitchen. I loved it, too, before I heard it 6,458 times, Lily thought, and walked over to Martin’s booth to clear it.

The dirty plate, silverware, coffee cup and saucer had been stacked and pushed to one side of the table, but lying squarely in the middle was a white napkin, and on it, written in large, cursive letters was the word “mouth.” That was all. Mouth? Lily thought. A thin ray of sunshine eked through a hole in the cloud cover and lit the table at a slant. Lily picked up the napkin and stared at it. Could this be what he was talking about, the thing he was going to leave me on the table? How weird. The ink had bled into the soft paper. Lily shook her head, and then, without knowing why, she glanced around to see if anyone had seen her reading the napkin. No one was showing the slightest interest. Lily brought her hands together, crumpled the paper, and quickly stuffed it into the back pocket of her jeans. Then she lifted the stack of dishes from the table and headed for the kitchen.

*   *   *

Lily told Hank not to come that night. When she heard the disappointment in his voice, she felt bad, but
Some Like It Hot
was on TV that night, and she wanted to watch Marilyn alone. Hank had teased Lily about Marilyn, had said she was dizzy on the subject, and once when Lily had tried to articulate her feelings about her, Hank had grinned through the explanation. After that, she had stopped talking about Marilyn to Hank or anyone else. The Marilyn story had started with
Bus Stop.
Lily was still living with her parents then. That was before her father’s cancer operation, before they moved to Florida to get away from the winters, and she had stayed up watching the movie until two o’clock in the morning. The coat in the very last scene had clinched it. The cowboy had taken off his jacket and put it around Marilyn’s shoulders, and when she snuggled into it, her whole upper body had moved and trembled as if she were being kissed on her cheeks and neck and shoulders, and when Lily had looked into Marilyn’s face on the screen, she had felt she was seeing a wonderful and dangerous happiness that was so strong it was almost pain. The scene had made her want to act more than anything in the world, and the next morning she had told her parents that she wanted to be an actress. They hadn’t said much. Her mother told her in a gentle voice that high school plays and real theater were two different kettles of fish, and her father said a B.A. prepared you for everything. But Marilyn had made Lily think about acting in a new way, and she started wondering if it wasn’t a way of being very close to the heart of things, that maybe acting actually brought you closer to the world rather than farther away from it.

After
Bus Stop,
Lily found Marilyn Monroe everywhere: in magazines, tabloids, comic books, on T-shirts and stickers, on posters and flags. She noticed little statues of her in ceramic and metal and rubber and saw her face and body emblazoned on ashtrays, mugs, pencils and clocks. But for Lily these icons were no more than crude approximations of the person on the screen, cheap leering versions of something intimate, almost sacred, and she avoided them. She had her poster, which she had chosen carefully in a store in Minneapolis, deciding against the famous one from
The Seven Year Itch
of Marilyn standing over the grate, her skirt billowing out from her thighs, for one less well known. She had bought a biography then, too, and had started it eagerly, searching among the details of Norma Jean’s life for the secret she had glimpsed in the movie, but after about a hundred pages, she realized it wasn’t there and stopped reading. As she lay in bed that evening watching
Some Like It Hot,
Lily laughed out loud at the men dressed as women and listened to Marilyn’s voice, to its halting rhythms and breaths, and near the end, she studied the dress Marilyn was wearing. It was like part of her body, she decided, hardly clothes at all, a magical movie dress Lily imagined herself wearing, not in Webster, of course, but in a faraway city, like Los Angeles or New York or Paris, where women went slinking into clubs and bars in next to nothing. She smiled to herself and took bites of the Milky Way she had bought especially for the movie.